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A Nation, not a Ball Game

If life is a competition with each other then, like the NFL, we will be divided into winners and losers.  Like the NCAA, half of us will go to bowl games, and the other half will be branded, "losers".  

 "Our first goal", the Minnesota Twins have said all year, "is to reach .500".  Well, they still haven't reached .500.  In fact, they have reached .408.  They have won 40.8% of their games.  

 By definition, or necessity, half of the games played produce precisely as many losers as they do winners.  Fans who demand winning teams are, at the same time, demanding that somebody else be a loser.  

 Baseball can be a lot of fun, even when the team loses but, admittedly, it is more fun, most of the time, when it wins.  But the plain fact is that, in a competition, there are as many losers as winners.  

 If life together, as in American life, is a competition, and only a competition, then half of us, of necessity, will be losers.  Winners demand losers!

 People who reduce life to making money need losers.  People who think like that seem to be in control of our political processes.  It does not dismay them that half the population is poor, or without health care, or that they will face end-of-life poverty.  Those are the breaks!  That is the game of life!

 But a nation is not Football Saturday in the South.  A nation is as much cooperation as it is competition.  In fact, nationhood is fundamentally about cooperation:  "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Together, we have vowed to

  • form a more perfect union
  • establish justice
  • insure domestic tranquility
  • provide for the common defense
  • promote the general welfare
  • secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity 
That is not a ball game!  

 It is a contest designed and intended to produce the blessings of liberty, not only to some of us, but to all of us, and our posterity.

 And, perhaps, that is what we are in danger of losing:  our sense of being a nation, and not a ball game.  

 "One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all!"

  (Yes, that is how I learned it when I was in school.  You didn't have to believe in God or the Pope, or Martin Luther, but you could, if you wanted to.  The goal wasn't to choose a religion:  it was to secure liberty and justice for all.)

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